Saturday, April 17, 2010

Iran is No Threat, Right? Obama Had Better Be Right

It seems as if Barack Obama has some sort of pathological obsession with being the "Anti-Bush." True, it got him elected president and whipped up his base, but he has a much higher degree of responsibility now as head of the only global superpower. He is no longer on the campaign trail, although, like a young man clinging to the trappings of adolescence, he continues to act as if he were. Come on Barry, put up your X-Box, it is time to meet with the Generals.

Nowhere is his obsession with being "the Anti-Bush" more obvious than in foreign policy. If Bush was tough with America's enemies, Obama is soft and deferential. If Bush was loyal to Eastern European nations seeking to escape the orbit of Russian, Obama ignores them studiously all the while cozying up to Tsar Putin. If Bush was Israel's friend and ally, Obama joins the Europeans in blaming Israel for Islamic terrorism. And so it goes.

Mark Steyn has a few caustic comments on Obama's determination to think well of Tehran's Mullahs and his (obsessive) apathy toward Iran's nuclear ambitions. It is as if he has conceded that Iran will get nuclear weapons and that means that terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah will also have them, so therefore Israel better get busy appeasing the Arabs right away in any way the Arabs demand appeasement or, well, he (Obama) can't be responsible for the consequences.

Steyn writes:
"In years to come — assuming, for the purposes of argument, there are any years to come — scholars will look back at President Obama’s Nuclear Security Summit and marvel. For once, the cheap comparisons with 1930s appeasement barely suffice: To be sure, in 1933, the great powers were meeting in Geneva and holding utopian arms-control talks even as Hitler was taking office in Berlin. But it’s difficult to imagine Neville Chamberlain in 1938 hosting a conference on the dangers of rearmament, and inviting America, France, Brazil, Liberia, and Thailand . . . but not even mentioning Germany.

Yet that’s what Obama just did: He held a nuclear gabfest in 2010, the biggest meeting of world leaders on American soil since the founding of the U.N. 65 years ago — and Iran wasn’t on the agenda."
Iran will have the bomb in a year or two plus intermediate range missiles that can reach Europe, as well as Israel. And the process of handing off suitcase bombs to terrorists will likely have begun, although there won't be any way for us to know for sure.

European leaders, the Obama administration and the left in general are absolutely sure that the right wing, neo-con paranoia about Iran is misplaced and overwrought. They are sure that the parallels to the 1930s are laughable. They are as sure as Neville Chamberlain was that the horrors of the Great War would never be repeated because people are just too darn reasonable to let such a thing happen.

They had better be right . . . because if not, we are all in big trouble.

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